Close To Me

This post is about as real as blog posts come, so look away now if you don’t want to be set on a bit of a downer today…

Have you ever sat quietly, almost frozen in a moment, maybe on the side of your bed, or during a trip to a park, and realized you lost something important? Something important enough that you definitely need it, but subtle enough that you didn’t realise it was missing until you got some time to yourself to look for it? I lost something like that. It was me. I lost me. Somewhere along the journey of life that I’m traveling through, I put myself to the side – just for a minute I swear – but I left me behind. I forgot myself somewhere along the way.
I didn’t notice it at first, or maybe I did but I just told myself otherwise. But I’ve now come to realise I lost me a long time ago, and if I want to keep moving forward I need to find myself and my contented mindset again. But what was I like before I lost ‘me’?

How do I know when I’ve found me if I can’t remember what it was like to be me in the first place?

It’s probably a bit like driving to a place you think you’ve been before – but in reality you’ve never been there, and now you’re driving aimlessly wondering where this destination is.
People call this feeling a lot of things: loss, mourning, depression, numbness etc. But does the label really influence what the feeling is? Yes, and no. As my good friend Rob says, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. So in that regard, a label is great. You know what you’re up against and that can help you come up with a game plan. But the label can be a hindrance too. It might make you judge a situation differently and excuse other people’s actions because of their labels, ultimately doing yourself a disservice.

How do you find yourself? Now isn’t that the million dollar question! If anyone had a true and worthwhile answer to this, we probably wouldn’t have a whole market based completely on self-help books and gurus like Dr Phil and Oprah. Don’t I wish I had the answer! I don’t, but I know what can help me at times – taking some time out to reassess. I’m a very social creature and I would spend all my time around other people if I could, but when I start to feel lost I like to take some time out to deal with the feeling. If I don’t do that, anxiety will always get the better of me. And anxiety will always make a situation like this feel 100 times worse.

I’m trying to find me, but I honestly feel like I’m failing miserably at this. For a while, things pick up and I’m busy with some project or other and I honestly feel like I’m getting somewhere; I’m driving the car in the right direction and I’m finding me. But then something in my environment will change and it’ll have an almost crushing affect – the car stops and I’ll fall apart. I’ve lost my way again. It’s tiring and it tries my patience to the very end.
I wanted to write this to let others out there know that you are not alone in this journey. There are a lot of people feeling this lost. It can also make it hard to connect with others, and it sometimes tricks me into being paranoid of what others think of me. So if you’re going through this feeling, watch out for that – you can very easily end up isolating yourself. I’m doing my best to move forward with this journey, and I’ll happily let you guys know how it goes but I know it’s gonna take a lot of time… The plan is to stay busy, I hope that works out for me, and for you too.
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